Kanye West Paid $250K to Prevent Sex Tape Leak, Cousin Claims

On The Life of Pablo track "Real Friends," Kanye West raps that he "had a cousin that stole my laptop that I was f---in' bitches on / Paid that n--- 250 thousand just to get it from him." A new report claims this wasn't one of Kanye's colorful spur-of-the-moment rantings — it actually happened.

According to a man named Lawrence Franklin, who told British tabloid the Daily Mailthat he's Kanye's cousin, the video in question was discovered on a used laptop that Kanye reportedly re-gifted to another relative. This was in 2012, the same year Kanye began dating now-wife Kim Kardashian.

"I was at my aunt's house when the family member who had the laptop called me, a friend of his, and my uncle to the kitchen where he opened the laptop to show a video of Kanye in clear view having sex with a fair-skinned black woman," Franklin told the Daily Mail. If true, the anecdote gives new meaning to "no good deed goes unpunished," and lends credence to another phrase: Always wipe the hard drive.

"The family member knew what he had was gold, and later called an old friend of his that was an attorney," Franklin continued. "He put together a small team him and his attorney went after Kanye, and to show that they meant business they leaked a little information publicly to let it be known they indeed had the footage."

"The family member tried to keep a low profile but it was not long before Kanye's team learned who it was that had the sex tape," Franklin says. If this attorney was indeed an "old friend" of the family member in question, it does track that some rudimentary research would easily trace the source.

Franklin claims multiple sources, including a porn distributor, showed interest in the tape, but "Kanye was adamant that the tape would never get released."

"'I'm not entirely sure why but one can only assume that because the woman in the video was not [ex-girlfriend] Amber Rose or Kim, or any woman he was linked with - that could have been the reason," Franklin wildly speculates. Or it could be any number of equally logical reasons, including wanting to prevent a lawsuit from the unnamed woman in the video, or Kanye simply not wanting a sex tape of himself floating around?

Franklin, who seems to have little-to-no current relationship with Kanye and told the paper "for the most part I don't look at the Kardashians as real people," additionally speculated that the breach of trust caused a shift in who Kanye chose to start surrounding himself with.